#software quality engineer

The rapid penetration of digital technology through devices and applications has transformed the lives of the end customers. Activities that were considered challenging, inconvenient, and time-consuming in the past are done in a jiffy now. Take for example, the paying of utility bills, carrying out financial transactions, buying groceries, medicines, apparels, or the booking of tickets. However, there is a flip side to convenience, agility, and speed offered by digitization as well. With an increased level of sophistication of software applications driving the digital revolution, there are instances when things can go wrong. For example, a malfunctioning smoke detector at the house or office not picking up the smoke caused by a fire, the bank failing to notify the customer that his or her account has been compromised, or a digital pill miscalculating the level of blood sugar and administering more than the prescribed dosage of a drug.

All these can have severe ramifications for both the customer and the service provider. This brings into sharp focus the key role of quality assurance in ensuring technology to be an enabler and not a disaster. Further, to achieve success in the competitive business environment, enterprises should look beyond the customer experience, which can be a one-off thing. The challenge is to establish trust with the end-user by assuring the quality of products or services on a consistent basis.

However, this is easier said than done, for quality assurance can often miss a thing or two. This is due to the preponderance of devices, operating platforms, browsers, third-party applications, and networks. To ensure the smooth running of a software application, the same needs to be compatible with the above-mentioned elements. Moreover, in the Agile and DevOps led Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), where there is a requirement for continuous testing, integration, and delivery, QA should give way to software quality engineering.

 What is software quality engineering?

As opposed to quality assurance, software quality engineering deals with identifying the causes of failures and implements a system to prevent them from occurring in the first place. It is focused more on analyzing the technical side of glitches such as their deviation and non-compliance, or the signing of quality prior to the delivery of a product. In most organizations, there is an overlap between the disciplines of enterprise quality engineering and quality assurance. It mainly deals with developing an environment where products or services are designed, developed, tested, and delivered according to the requirements of the customers. Independent quality engineering services take the cross-functional approach by combining multiple business disciplines.

So, with the advent of technologies like AI and ML, Blockchain, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, and Big Data, among others, the vulnerabilities have increased as well. Since the ramifications for application malfunction are immense, the need for a software quality engineer has become crucial. Let us find out how Quality Engineering or QE can help in achieving excellence in quality.

A quality engineering company offering QE services covers the following areas:

Agile and DevOps testing

Test data management

Service virtualization

Test automation

Security testing

Performance testing

How enterprise quality engineering can help driving excellence

The main focus of QE is to build a QA environment that preempts the presence of glitches and achieve the following outcomes.

Reduces or eliminates vulnerabilities: With the development and testing team working in close proximity, QE offers end-to-end transparency to everyone associated with the build process. This approach helps to detect vulnerabilities and inherent risks early in the SDLC and ensures the initiation of prompt remedial action.

Streamlines coordination among departments: The reasons for glitches to remain unidentified is that every department deals with its turf only. Even if glitches are identified by another department or process, the tendency is to overlook the same and pass the buck. However, with independent quality engineering services in command, the old ways of workflows are abandoned in favor of more coordination and cohesion. Since a commonality of interest is established among departments, the usual blame game is averted.

Enhanced productivity with automation: The flip-side of manual testing such as the lack of coverage area and errors in regression testing can be avoided with test automation. The iterative testing processes are executed quickly resulting in better identification of glitches. As the quality of code improves in the build, the overall delivery schedule becomes better and speedy.

 Conclusion

With the level of sophistication increasing in the digital ecosystem, traditional Quality Assurance can come a cropper. It is only through the implementation of software quality engineering involving steps such as service virtualization, performance testing, and test data management, among others, that excellence in the quality of applications can be achieved.

Author Bio

The rapid penetration of digital technology through devices and applications has transformed the lives of the end customers. Activities that were considered challenging, inconvenient, and time-consuming in the past are done in a jiffy now. Take, for example, the paying of utility bills, carrying out financial transactions, buying groceries, medicines, apparel, or the booking of tickets. However, there is a flip side to convenience, agility, and speed offered by digitization as well. With an increased level of sophistication of the software applications driving the digital revolution, there are instances when things can go wrong. For example, a malfunctioning smoke detector at the house or office not picking up the smoke caused by a fire, the bank failing to notify the customer that his or her account has been compromised, or a digital pill miscalculating the level of blood sugar and administering more than the prescribed dosage of a drug.

All these can have severe ramifications for both the customer and the service provider. This brings into sharp focus the key role of quality assurance in ensuring technology to be an enabler and not a disaster. Further, to achieve success in the competitive business environment, enterprises should look beyond the customer experience, which can be a one-off thing. The challenge is to establish trust with the end-user by assuring the quality of products or services on a consistent basis.

However, this is easier said than done, for quality assurance can often miss a thing or two. This is due to the preponderance of devices, operating platforms, browsers, third-party applications, and networks. To ensure the smooth running of a software application, the same needs to be compatible with the above-mentioned elements. Moreover, in the Agile and DevOps led Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), where there is a requirement for continuous testing, integration, and delivery, QA should give way to software quality engineering.

 What is software quality engineering?

As opposed to quality assurance, software quality engineering deals with identifying the causes of failures and implements a system to prevent them from occurring in the first place. It is focused more on analyzing the technical side of glitches such as their deviation and non-compliance, or the signing of quality prior to the delivery of a product. In most organizations, there is an overlap between the disciplines of enterprise quality engineering and quality assurance. It mainly deals with developing an environment where products or services are designed, developed, tested, and delivered according to the requirements of the customers. Independent quality engineering services take the cross-functional approach by combining multiple business disciplines.

So, with the advent of technologies like AI and ML, Blockchain, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, and Big Data, among others, the vulnerabilities have increased as well. Since the ramifications for application malfunction are immense, the need for a software quality engineer has become crucial. Let us find out how Quality Engineering or QE can help in achieving excellence in quality.

A quality engineering company offering QE services cover the following areas,

Agile and DevOps testing

Test data management

Service virtualization

Test automation

Security testing

Performance testing

 How enterprise quality engineering can help driving excellence

The main focus of QE is to build a QA environment that preempts the presence of glitches and achieve the following outcomes.

Reduces or eliminates vulnerabilities: With the development and testing team working in close proximity, QE offers end-to-end transparency to everyone associated with the build process. This approach helps to detect vulnerabilities and inherent risks early in the SDLC and ensures the initiation of prompt remedial action.

Streamlines coordination among departments: The reasons for glitches to remain unidentified is that every department deals with its turf only. Even if glitches are identified by another department or process, the tendency is to overlook the same and pass the buck. However, with independent quality engineering services in command, the old ways of workflows are abandoned in favor of more coordination and cohesion. Since a commonality of interest is established among departments, the usual blame game is averted.

Enhanced productivity with automation: The flip-side of manual testing such as the lack of coverage area and errors in regression testing can be avoided with test automation. The iterative testing processes are executed quickly resulting in better identification of glitches. As the quality of code improves in the build, the overall delivery schedule becomes better and speedy.

 Conclusion

With the level of sophistication increasing in the digital ecosystem, traditional Quality Assurance can come a cropper. It is only through the implementation of software quality engineering involving steps such as service virtualization, performance testing, and test data management, among others, that excellence in the quality of applications can be achieved.

Author Bio

Oliver has been associated with Cigniti Technologies Ltd as an Associate Manager - Content Marketing, with over 10 years of industry experience as a Content Writer in Software Testing & Quality Assurance industry.

Before the era of consumerization and the advent of digitization, quality has become the center of attention for businesses. However, the emergence of digital technologies including the internet has empowered consumers to find out and compare an endless list of products from across the world. Quality assurance to end users has become an indispensable feature of attaining success along with the right digital strategy. Organizations are at different levels in their digital transformation journey and at distinct speeds as well. No matter what levels they are at, their business objectives have stayed the same - delivering a superior quality product at high speed.

The implementation of digital technologies has become imperative to stay ahead of the competition in most of the industry verticals. Today's organizations realize that they cannot retain or gain a competitive advantage unless they continuously deliver exceptional quality software faster than their counterparts. In fact, user experience and speed have become even more critical for success and survival. This is the primary reason why development initiatives such as DevOps and Agile have become a part of the digital transformation milestones and the boardroom agenda.

With time to market becoming shorter, the importance of software quality engineering has shifted entirely from the erstwhile way of waterfall testing in the SDLC. Most organizations today pursue Agile methodology that offers accelerated delivery of products and services. Enterprise quality engineering always ensures timely release of all builds, be it the tools, hardware, data, cloud solutions, performance-related readiness, and devices. Digital quality today requires an engineering approach that is different from the traditional method to achieve agile delivery and prevent defects.

Let us look into some of the primary features of these approaches below:

Business agility and continuous testing:

Automation is not a stand-alone approach anymore where scripts are executed by respective specialists and status reports are accumulated later. Automation today is synonymous with Continuous Integration and is scheduled to be run as the build arrives. The integration of automation with test management solutions achieve shortened release cycles with an automatic appearance of results without any human intervention. With shortened release cycles, the time for verifying quality also gets reduced significantly, thereby, elevating business agility.

According to Andy Walter, the CEO of Procter and Gamble, manual testing is no longer a sustainable method, for it creates bottlenecks for organizations in achieving operational excellence. With the help of continuous testing, organizations are able to radically evolve their ecosystems. Organizations cannot satisfy the rigorous demands of digital transformation without Continuous Testing and DevOps along with the agility and speed they trigger.

Exceptional user experience

Digital platforms help derive continuous and immediate feedback on applications’ quality. Any feature of the services and products that does not satisfy customer expectations is handled with harsh reviews by disappointed end users. Therefore, UX has become as crucial as the application’s functionality.  Software quality engineering should be integrated into the digital transformation strategy for seamless UX assurance. User experience is a combination of various factors such as device capabilities, application flow, ease of interaction with application UI, networks, and so on. As the performance of any application is paramount, every outage, crash, and slowing down of the application can raise customer grievances. These, in turn, can directly have an impact on the revenue and value proposition of organizations.

The software quality engineers identify such challenges and work on mitigating them. As per Vittorio Cretella, the CIO of Mars, quality assurance is critical for creating an exceptional user experience. Previously, there has been a cushion between consumer and information technologies, but now, everything is interconnected, thereby, placing IT in a very strategic position in any organization. Organizations need to realize how the users are responding and how to achieve an optimal customer experience with the help of continuous testing and quality assurance.

Role of Enterprise Quality Engineering in digital transformation

Digital quality engineering has a crucial role in the journey of digital transformation. Implementing quality checkpoints ensures delivery of the intended business outcomes along with end-user satisfaction. Quality assurance fortifies the end-product at each phase throughout the software development cycle and reduces challenges posed by latest technologies. Quality assurance plays the best supportive role in any company's digital initiatives to ensure security and performance.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) is set to take over the organizational value chain and determine how they are interconnected, it has become indispensable for organizations to include quality engineering. Therefore, enterprises making advances towards the direction of extended digitalization already understand the associated risks and see the entire picture of quality challenges. QE keeps a continuous check on the quality of the service or products being offered right from the beginning of a software development cycle. Enterprise quality engineering tries to meet the three main agendas of a company’s digital transformation initiative: safeguarding brand image, demanding quality assurance and delivering client satisfaction.

Safeguarding brand image

Quality assurance measures the end-user experience across several digital platforms. This enhances accessibility, minimizes response time, and enhances the brand image of the organization. Software quality engineering addresses the following difficulties in testing user experience across multiple devices, platforms, and networks.

Devising test cases.

Gathering important requirements in the test set and the right coverage of end-user expectations.

Using test tools for user experience testing.

Establishing test data for customer experience testing.

Entire Life cycle Automation: Quality Assurance expedites the transformation process not only with the implementation of application-level automation but also by speeding up life cycle automation. Apart from utilizing the conventional automation method, digital quality engineering focuses on testing the end-to-end software development life cycle, thus ensuring impeccable user experience and cross-platform compatibility.

Advanced level analytics data support

Enterprise Quality Engineering utilizes advanced level analytics to extract data from several commercial and social platforms that can be used in productive decision making. This offers exhaustive insights into all levels of the end-user experience.

Conclusion

Digital channels are pushing enterprises to reach the end consumers faster through unique services and products with satisfactory results at the core. Therefore, in the modern digital economy, enterprise quality engineering experience (for customized and omnichannel experience), speed (test results as you build and even before) and iterative development (creating a viable product) are what organizations are striving for. This is where, an independent quality engineering company can bring values by successfully establishing quality assurance practices across the technological ecosystems.

The quality of a product or service plays the all-important role in differentiating a successful enterprise from an also-ran one. In the highly competitive digital era, the choice for enterprises to stay relevant, competitive, and customer centric is clear – offer superior quality products (and services) at equally high speed. The days of legacy systems and old paradigms seem to be numbered, for now, the thrust is towards incorporating new technologies and reimagining the business architecture to deliver the best customer experience. However, ensuring quality across the digital ecosystem comprising a multitude of device platforms, frameworks, operating systems, browsers, and networks, can be challenging.

The rapidly changing user preferences and the need to keep with the latest technology trends can overwhelm any enterprise worth its salt. Also, a significant section of the industry has adopted Agile and DevOps methodologies to achieve the above-mentioned objectives. The challenge, therefore, is to incorporate shift-left testing in the SDLC underpinned by test automation to achieve objectives such as – maximizing the test coverage area and offering Continuous Integration and Delivery solutions. Since the traditional model of quality assurance is found to be wanting in meeting these objectives, especially in the Agile-DevOps driven ecosystem, the need to adopt software quality engineering becomes inevitable.

What is quality engineering?

The digital transformation initiatives undertaken by enterprises to be with the times encompass simplification, modernization, and securing of the legacy systems and aligning them with the cutting-edge technologies of today. In this endeavour, quality needs to have a 360-degree approach that straddles the end-to-end spectrum of the SDLC. This is where enterprises need to employ independent quality engineering services driven by intelligent and automated processes. Thus, the process of quality engineering (QE) ensures the quality of software application is validated, enhanced, and analyzed throughout the SDLC.

It vastly differs with the traditional waterfall model where QA takes place in a silo at the end of the software development process. Moreover, QE rises above the shift-left QA process as well by performing both functions – detecting and preventing the occurrence of glitches. In other words, quality engineering is comprehensive, descriptive, effective, and vastly superior to the existing QA practices.

Importance of software quality engineering in the Agile-DevOps driven world

In the Agile and DevOps models of development and testing, quality is optimized throughout the SDLC. Here, every stakeholder is made accountable to ensure the quality of the software application, which in practice, can suffer from infirmities. To put this conundrum in simple terms – since it is everyone’s responsibility to drive quality through rigour and discipline, no one seems to take ownership. In the absence of a disciplined mechanism to monitor quality, the exercise to shift towards Agile or DevOps becomes meaningless. Thus, even though the product may come out of the development cycle fast enough, its overall quality may leave much to be desired. Let us understand how enterprise quality engineering can help remedy the situation.

With QE, there is greater collaboration between developers and testers with the latter tasked with setting up the basic testing architecture to be relied upon for future testing exercises. QE can give a software quality engineer the requisite flexibility and wherewithal to increase the speed of testing by a long margin. This is done by incorporating test automation at the core of QE. It helps in not only executing both functional and non-functional testing but validating (and integrating) each layer of the application. Since the bulk of testing is executed through test automation, QE offers manual testers the much-needed flexibility to be innovative and exploratory. Moreover, on the lines of DevOps, QE engenders changes in processes, tools, and people’s approach (and skills). In addition to Agile and DevOps testing, the services offered by a quality engineering company would include test automation, service virtualization, security testing, performance testing, monitoring and analysis, and test data management.

Conclusion

In a day and age dominated by changing market dynamics reflected in mergers and acquisitions, emerging security challenges and the consequent emphasis on risk and compliance, data analytics, mobile commerce and others, customers as well as business stakeholders are increasingly relying on IT. To deliver the best customer experience across the value chain, testers are moving beyond shift-left testing. Software quality engineering helps enterprises to strengthen decision making, improve the delivery of quality services, and deliver business value to the end customers.